Cecily Fitzsimons

Following an initial investigation into plastics from an ecofeminist perspective, I found alarming research exploring the impact of microplastics, specifically PCB’s, on the human body, children, and breast milk. In Akwesasne, the result of “approximately 823,000 cubic yards of PCB-contaminated materials” (LaDuke, 1999) has left the people of the Mohawk nation, and their new-born children, contaminated by microplastics. This is merely a snapshot of the wider global plastic pandemic within the human body.  The impact of PCB’s and BPAs on young children, transferred through breast milk, have been proven to later cause “breast and prostate cancer, obesity, neurobehavioral problems, and reproductive abnormalities” (Gill, 2022). Provoked by the invisibility of this issue and enthralled by the paralleling connotations of purity versus contamination, I was captured by breast milk, both as motif and media.

At the beginning of my experimentation, I explored milk through print. Using tetra pak milk cartons as a symbol of the invisibility of the microplastics – due to their deceptive ‘cardboard’ appearance – I found them a loaded media to create dry point etchings. Following artist research of how Louise Bourgeois’ “The Good Mother and The Bad Mother suggest a frightening interdependency in which the mother holds the power to threaten the child's very being,” (Betterton, 2009), the body and milk became imperative motifs in conveying the concept through a visceral and feminist lens. Using bubble wrap bubbles as an unsettling vessel for spoiled milk, I contained the separated liquid connoting amniotic fluid, and developed themes of contamination or spoil. The injection process into the bubbles, whilst necessary logistically, held further significance in underpinning a clinical tone of unnatural intervention, influenced by Margaret Atwood’s novel ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’. Oil, red food colouring and milk solids were further injected into the bubble wrap, creating cell-like imagery, an ode to the microplastic damage to new-born cells. Starkly lit photography illuminated malignant plastic cell membranes and abject bursting fluids.

I feel that my outcome both effectively conveyed my concept and evoked an abject discomfort within the viewer, confronting the harsh reality of these horrors within the bodies of ourselves and our children. The inherent foul smell of the spoiled milk media and the time-based element of decay within the work is perhaps an area of symbolism I would further explore in development of the project.